Honor Magic6 Pro review: Firing on all cylinders

Honor has been making some of the technically best phones for some time now, with the Honor Magic5 Pro from last year being hailed for its stunning display and excellent camera tech. The Honor Magic6 Pro builds on last year’s device with an updated processor, an even better display, and a further improved camera that should make its mobile photography capabilities even more impressive.

But the phone goes up against tough competition. The device has to contend with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, at least in regions where the two are available — not to mention the other high-end Chinese devices.

Does the Honor Magic6 Pro do enough to compete? I’ve been using the phone for a while now to find out.

Honor Magic6 Pro specs

Honor Magic6 Pro design

The overall design of the Honor Magic6 Pro is a natural continuation of last year’s Magic5 Pro — and I quite like the overall look of it. The phone has a large circular camera module towards the top, and it’s shaped more like a squircle than the circle that was found on last year’s phone. It’s interesting, and gives the phone a more unique spin.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

The rest of the phone’s design elements are more or less where you would expect them to be. There’s a volume rocker and power button on the right side, with the USB-C port on the bottom.

on the front can be found an edge-to-edge display with a small oval cutout for the dual front-facing cameras, a la iPhone 15. It doesn’t look bad, and while a few years ago I assumed we’d have moved to an under-display camera by now, you’ll forget that the cutout exists reasonably quickly.

The phone is generally well built, and I really like the matte glads used on the back of the phone. I found that it helps give the phone a more premium feel overall, and it’s already quite a premium-feeling device.

Honor Magic6 Pro display

The display is easily one of the best things about the Honor Magic6 Pro. It’s stunning. The display offers a 1280 x 2800 resolution, and while it’s a little shy of a full 1440p screen, it still looks excellent. It’s nice and big, at 6.8 inches, and it’s an LTPO OLED display, so it’ll cycle its refresh rate between 1Hz and 120Hz, depending on what you’re doing, to save battery.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

Honor boasts a maximum brightness of 5,000 bits, in HDR, and indeed the screen did get very bright. I was easily able to see content on the screen, even outdoors in direct sunlight. It’s not the single brightest screen out there, but it is very bright, and easily bright enough for any situation. It supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, too — so you’ll be able to enjoy modern content in all its HDR glory if you’re into watching movies on your phone.

Honor Magic6 Pro performance

Under the hood, the Magic6 Pro has a lot to offer, too. The device comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, coupled with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, depending on the configuration.

The end result? A phone that can handle everything you can throw at it in 2024. The phone is on the same level of performance as devices like the Samsung Galaxy S24 series, and expect to be able to do things like play intensive mobile games and multitask with ease. Here are the benchmark results we achieved with the device.

• GeekBench 6: 2,246 single-core, 6,972 multi-core
• 3DMark Wild Life Extreme: 5,179

These are excellent results, and show that the phone is among the best-performing Android phones out there. If you’re looking for a high-performing device, the Magic6 Pro is a great candidate.

Honor Magic6 Pro battery and charging

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

Powering it all is a relatively large 5,600mAh battery, which is Honor’s second-generation silicon-carbon battery, and I found it was able to deliver an excellent battery life. In fact, the device should get users through two days of use without any issue, and if you charge your phone every night, you won’t have to worry about it running out of juice before the end of the day unless you really push it to its limits.

The charging speeds aren’t bad, either. The device supports wired charging of 80W, which is decently quick, though not as fast as some of its competitors that can charge at over 100W. And, it even supports wireless charging at up to 66W, though you’ll need the right wireless charging to reach those speeds. Without the charger, you’ll be limited to 7.5W Qi charging speeds. However, it’s still nice to see wireless charging here.

Honor Magic6 Pro camera

On the back of the phone, you’ll find a triple camera array, made up of a 50-megapixel main camera, a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto camera with 2.5x optical zoom, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera with a 122-degree field-of-view.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

I found that the camera was able to produce crisp, detailed images the vast majority of the time. There’s little noise, and colors are bright and vibrant, with good dynamic range. In well-lit environments, the camera was consistently good — so expect to be able to point and shoot with good results. The phone does have some AI features that are aimed at boosting HDR when, for example, it detects that the sky is in the frame, and I actually quite liked the results — however, you can turn this feature off. And, in low lighting, the phone still produced relatively detailed shots.

One of the best things about the camera system is the fact that it has a 180-megapixel telephoto camera. Optically, the camera can only zoom to 2.5x, but when you include sensor-crop technology, you can reach 5x of lossless zoom. It’s interesting that you can’t achieve a further lossless zoom, given the high camera resolution. However, with digital zoom you can get to 100x zoom total. Don’t expect very good photos at that level, but even up to 15x or so, images looked excellent.

Generally, the camera quality on offer here is very good. The Magic6 Pro is able to produce some of the best smartphone photos out there, consistently.

Honor Magic6 Pro software

The Magic6 Pro comes with Android 14, with Honor’s MagicOS 8 layer on top of it. As you would expect from a high-end phone in 2024, Honor is pushing AI features to help differentiate the experience of using its phone. The headline AI feature is an AI eye-tracker that lets you interact with apps using your eyes — however, this feature isn’t available globally yet, so I was unable to test it.

Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

Other AI features include a new AI Suggestion feature, which is built to suggest apps based on your behavior, and a text selection feature that lets you get raw text from images.

Apart from the AI features, the software is generally easy to navigate, though it is pretty heavy as an Android skin. There are features like the iOS-like control center, which doesn’t show up on other Android skins — but overall, most will get used to the operating system.

Conclusions

Honor’s recent flagship phones have been technically excellent, and the Magic6 Pro is no exception to that rule. It’s easily one of the best phones you can get right now, with top-tier performance, a stunning screen, and a flagship-level camera. Not everyone will love the software experience, but those who can look past it, and have the Magic6 Pro available to them, should consider it. It’s not cheap, but you won’t regret buying it.

The competition

The biggest competition to the Magic6 Pro comes from a device like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and the device you get may simply depend on the region you live in. I do find the software experience on the Galaxy S24 Ultra to be a little better — but as mentioned, you will get used to the look and feel of it.

Should I buy the Honor Magic6 Pro?

Yes. It’s an excellent phone with top-tier specs.